Crucifixion is perhaps the single most abiding image of the Roman Empire.
Other icons rise and fall, the perfect “white” marble buildings crumbling into dust, the busts whose monocephalic form barely disguises the obvious bodily paunch their likenesses bore, even the Capitoline wolf that we now learn might be medieval, loses some of its whine, but the cross, the symbol of Roman brutality and control has endured.
One of the most famous crucifixion scenes from antiquity is that, of course, of Spartacus and his self liberated army of freedom fighters.
The most abiding version of this scene to the modern mind is from the film Spartacus starring Kirk Douglas, directed by Sir Stanley Kubrick, based on the novel by Howard Fast who was imprisoned for his political beliefs during America’s War on Communism. At the end of the film, the army of Spatacus are offered the chance to be enslaved again but to survive if they give up their leader. Spartacus, knowing that the alternative is the grim and lingering death by crucifixion (the traditional punishment for enslaved people who sought freedom by their own means or who demonstrated resistance), offers himself up. “I am Spatacus”. The crowd of followers, singularly and then together, also shout “I am Spartacus”, showing solidarity to the end and preferring death to enslavement. It is a stirring scene, still powerful, even after loads of pastiches.
The reality of such a death was grim.
Lewis Grassic Gibbon, the Scotch author, in his novel Spatacus (published in the ominous year of 1933) presents a more gruesome account of state reprisals.
And Licinius Crassus had the slaves brought forth, all through the heat of a summer day as he marched his army slowly up towards Rome, and one by one nailed on the new-made crosses. And at length even the men of the legions turned in horror from looking back along the horizon at that stretch of undulating, crying figures fading down into the sun-haze. Some, nailed on the cross, shrieked aloud with agony as the nails scraped through their bones or splintered those bones so that ragged slivers hung from the flesh. Some fainted. Some cried on strange Gods, and now at last pleaded for mercy while the legionaries drove the nails home through hands and feet. Then each cross was lifted, and the body of the slave upon it would bulge forth and the crack of the tearing flesh sound as the cross was flung in the hole new-dug. And the smell of blood and excrement increased as the day went by, wolves gathered that night and clouds of carrion-birds, waiting. And at last the last cross was flung in the earth, and the Romans departed.
Coming at the end of the novel, this passage reveals something of Gibbon’s approach to the story of Spartacus. First we notice the poetic style that combines the austere, almost biblical use of the word ‘And’ at the start of the sentences, with long flowing sentences and visceral, physical descriptions. It is remorseless.
Gibbon (a pseudonym of James Leslie Mitchell) was Scottish. In the 1920s he served in the British Forces in colonial outposts. He began writing full time in 1929. He died in 1935, having written and published 17 books in the short time allotted to him. His masterpiece is easily Scots Quair, a trilogy of novels which combine the same dreamlike descriptions of a hard life, this time, in the Highlands.
His novels are rich in sound and visual poetry, but they never lose a hardness and bleakness. At points his characters can be rhapsodic with an intensity almost inhuman:
Then in her madness for the Thracian Gladiator, in the wild rides and hidings that followed Capua, when the world gaped to engulf their revolt, there had seemed no purpose to guard herself afresh. The days and the nights of the Thracian’s love would endure but a shining space ere the dark came down.
Spartacus explores Gibbon’s interests and political views. He was sympathetic to left wing views, writing to a friend “I’m not an official Communist as they won’t let me in”.
One of the novel’s main characters, Kleon, is an educated enslaved person with some experience of previous revolutions. He identifies Spartacus as the power that might change ‘the order in Italy’ and encourages him to form a new state in Italy. He reads Plato, carrying around a copy of The Republic. He even tells Spartacus early in their relationship: “Then you’re in need of advice in how to the perfect state. I’ll read to you now from Plato the divine’. Although humorous, I think we are meant to understand Kleon (or Plato) as a proto-Marxist.
The novel starts and ends with Kleon’s perspective. At the very end, he has a vision of another crucifixion:
And he saw before him, gigantic, filling the sky, a great Cross with a figure that was crowned with thorns; and behind it, sky-towering as well, gladius in hand, his hand on the edge of the morning behind that Cross, the figure of a Gladiator.
And he saw that these Two were One, and the world yet theirs: and he went into unending night and left them that shining earth.
This scene unites Spartacus, Plato and Jesus. I would argue that Marx is also hidden somewhere in the vision, with the idea of revolution as a driving force of history culminating in a predefined end point. This scene also, of course, reflects the social and political importance of Christianity within the society in which Gibbon was writing, but I think it’s doing something more.
Throughout the novel there are hints of divine favor. Towards the end of the novel Spartacus reflects, ‘What though they marched on Rome, and took it, and slew the Beast of the Tiber’, drawing clear parallels with the apocalyptic ‘Whore of Babylon’, the symbol of ‘that great city, which reigns over the kings of the earth’ (Revelation 17:18).
I might also add the ‘What though…’ mirror’s Beelzebub’s lines in Paradise Lost:
‘What though the field be lost?
All is not Lost; the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And the courage never to submit or yield.
I don’t think this is unintentional. In the novel Spartacus’ army marches under the sign of the snake, an animal with a complex symbology (in the ancient world, in Gibbon’s time and today), yet one most closely associated in many people’s minds with Satan and the serpent in the Garden.
According to Plutarch, when Spartacus was first sold to slavery a snake coiled around his head while he slept.
“his wife, who came from the same tribe and was a prophetess subject to possession by the frenzy of [the god of ecstasy] Dionysus, declared that this sign meant that he would have a great and terrible power which would end in misfortune.”
There is an energy and a dynamism driving the slave army. Marx called this dialectical materialism. Others might call it providence.
We know from the histories that survive that some ancient revolutions may have had religious overtones.
In the first Roman Sicilian Revolution (First Servile War 135–132 BCE), the leader Eunis, who may have carefully planned the rebellion over several years, claimed to have visions from the Syrian goddess Atargaris. He was also said to be something of a magician, belching fire (perhaps a parlor trick) and reading fortunes.
He was a ‘messianic priest-king’, having predicted his future reign, during the period of his enslavement, as part of his enslaver’s dinner entertainment. As a self-freed leader, he called himself Antiochus, thus identifying himself with the Syrian Seleucid dynasty. The Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV Epiphanes (215 – 164 BCE), better known for his role in the Hanukkah story was also the first Seleucid to use divine epithets identifying himself as Θεὸς Ἐπιφανής “manifest god”.
Salvius Tryphon, the leader of the second Roman Sicilian Revolution (Second Servile War, 104-100 BCE) also identified himself as a Seleucid, suggesting memories of Eunus were still strong.
These earlier political leaders offer a new way to see Kleon’s final vision as he loses consciousness.
As the world in 1933 erupted into flames, fanned by fascist hatred, Gibbon wrote a novel to galvanize his readers and remind them of the long history of struggle. That Spartacus’ story seems to end in defeat is not the point. Like Christ, he is victorious in death, unconquered by the cross and still inspiring revolution.
Featured image: Spartacus’ death by Hermann Vogel (Public Domain)
Rhakotis 
